Discoveries using the telescopes on Mauna Kea

[TomK]

Fireball observed over Mauna Kea:

http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/news...-mauna-kea

This was on Tuesday evening last week. Fireballs aren't rare but don't often get captured by a camera.

[TomK]

I wrote:

"The actual paper will be published in a couple of day's time. When I have a little time, I'll have a look to see if there was any contribution from Hawaii."

SBH - in this case, it seems to be a purely Hubble-based discovery which I'm sure makes you proud! However, the detection of water in the Europa plumes, even the plumes themselves, is uncertain.

The paper can be read via:

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1609/1609.08215.pdf

[SBH]

Thanks Tom, unfortunately Dale had a heart attack and passed away last year so he didn't get to see this discovery. He was just one of many people involved in the Hubble's creation, so kudos to everyone involved.

Our family is most proud of his work on the Apollo missions to reach the moon with my grandfather who helped start Lockheed's Skunk Works in the 40's with Kelly Johnson.

They actually built more powerful telescopes than Hubble that are no longer secret.

http://www.space.com/16000-spy-satellite...-nasa.html

[HereOnThePrimalEdge]

The two spy satellite telescopes were originally built to fly space-based surveillance missions for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
...
NASA hopes to use one of the new space telescopes to hunt for mysterious dark energy, an invisible force that scientists think is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe.

What an appropriate re-purposing of the satellites. From Black Ops, to Dark Matter!

No fathers or mothers think their own children ugly; and this self-deceit is yet stronger with respect to the offspring of the mind. -Miguel de Cervantes, novelist (1547-1616)

[TomK]

SBH,

"Our family is most proud of his work on the Apollo missions to reach the moon [...]"

That should make you doubly proud. Involvement in the HST and possibly humankind's greatest achievement, the successful Apollo missions. I'm sorry for your loss.

[TomK]

Ionized oxygen atoms used to trace star formation in the early universe:

http://phys.org/news/2016-10-oxygen-trac...ution.html

This was a study that used UKIRT's wide-field capability over some years with contributions from Subaru and the CFHT, all on Mauna Kea. The results are now being published. The study was to understand how star formation and galaxies evolved in the early universe, and basically massive stars with short lifetimes dominated early galaxy formation, and then things calmed down a bit with less massive stars becoming more dominant.

This is a study I helped support at UKIRT, so it's nice to see the results of a lot of hard work bearing fruit!

[PaulW]

It's amazing what great science is going on up there. Unbelievable that some people want it to stop.

[kalakoa]

Unbelievable that some people want it to stop.

They don't want it to stop, they just want it to happen somewhere else, on land which is not sacred to them.

[TomK]

Hawaii-based scientists study volcanism in Hawaii, but also elsewhere in the solar system:

"Volcanoes on Io: Long-term Tracking with Adaptive Optics"

http://www.gemini.edu/node/12580

[TomK]

"Heartbeat Stars"

Observations using a high-resolution spectrometer called HIRES at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea have investigated a newly discovered type of stellar system; ones in which two stars orbit each other so closely that they actually stretch out each star into ellipsoids from their normal spherical shape. Because their orbits are elliptical (as are most orbiting systems in the universe) and the activity and brightness of each star change depending on the distance between them, they've been described as being analogous to a cardiogram.

More at http://phys.org/news/2016-10-heartbeat-stars.html